Professor Jaxon exited the classroom, and the moment he disappeared from sight, the room came alive again with the scraping of chairs, scattered laughter, and the overlapping hum of a dozen conversations.
Lara turned from the front row toward Alex, but the instant her eyes met his, she snapped her gaze toward Thalia instead. Alex noticed it, though he did not understand it. The girl cared about him, and it was becoming harder and harder to dismiss. Yet he could not make sense of it. He was starting to wonder whether something was wrong with her, whether she was doing it deliberately, or whether there was some hidden reason he simply was not aware of.
He wanted to walk up to her and ask. Ask her why she always seemed to be watching over him, why she always stepped in when no one else would. Even when Nack had appeared and grabbed him by the throat, she had been there. Even when Eldric had come with his minions and tried to corner him, Lara had shouted at Eldric, and even though Thalia had held her back from going further, her voice alone had made Eldric flinch and reconsider.
Alex sighed and let the breath he had unknowingly been holding rush out of him. It was too much. Far too much. There were too many things pressing down on him all at once. His marriage agreement with the princess had been dissolved. Then Nack had appeared out of nowhere, fingers wrapped around his throat, seemingly hellbent on making Alex pay for taking his position. And then Nack had returned back alongside Eldric and a group of his followers.
Alex exhaled again and pressed two fingers to his forehead. Seeing that no one was approaching him, he let his head drop onto the desk and turned to look out the window. The sky was the same easy, unbothered blue it always was. Birds drifted in the far distance, and then one bird in particular caught his eye. It was flying toward the academy. With each passing second it grew larger, and then larger still, swelling in size in a way that no ordinary bird ever would.
It was heading straight toward the window. Toward him.
"What!" Alex yelped and lurched backward, throwing his arms up to shield himself as the creature filled the entire frame of the window, enormous and dark, a half second away from crashing through the glass and sending shards scattering across the room.
He lowered his arms slowly sensing no change.
The creature had stopped. It hung there in the air, perfectly still except for the slow, powerful beat of its wings. Around the class, students had frozen in varying states of panic, some pressing themselves into the corners of the room, others gripping their desks. A few, it seemed, had not moved at all.
"Tch. Coward." The voice came from the back row beside the hallway, low and contemptuous, and Alex knew without looking that it belonged to Eldric.
"Come to the training ground, children." The creature spoke, and its voice was unmistakably human despite the sharp, resonant pitch underneath it that was nothing like a human voice at all. "I am Professor Daniel Crick."
Alex stared at it, unable to find a single word. He had never seen anything like it. The creature was roughly half the size of a carriage, with a reptilian jaw lined with sharp pointed teeth and a thick, heavy tongue. Its body was covered in dense black scales, and two enormous wings beat steadily at its sides while its tail swayed slowly behind it.
Then, slowly realization dawned in him. It was not a bird. It was a wyvern, something he had only ever seen illustrated in books. He had always read that wyverns were monsters without intelligence, without language, without any capacity for reason whatsoever. But the one standing in front of him seemingly floating in the air totally contradicted his beliefs.
Before he could linger longer in the thought, the wyvern turned and began descending toward the open training ground below.
Alex shoved his desk aside and pressed himself against the window, his palms flat on the glass. The wyvern landed heavily, scattering mud and loose soil in every direction, and then something happened that Alex could not have prepared himself for regardless of how long he had been standing there watching.
In a single blink of a second, the wyvern transformed. A sharp, blinding white light consumed its entire body, and the mass of scale and wing and tail seemed to fold and coil inward, condensing and reshaping itself until the light faded and left behind a man standing in the middle of the training ground. He was extraordinarily tall, even from this distance, dressed in a plain black shirt and black shorts, with a build so dense with muscle that his waist alone looked as wide as a tree trunk. The man turned toward the window and raised one hand, waving the class down to join him.
Alex let out a long, slow breath and felt the primal fear that had been gripping his chest dissolve as suddenly as it had come. He turned around to find that nearly every student in the room had crowded in beside him, faces pressed against the glass, all of them staring down at the man who had been a wyvern only moments ago.
Alex stepped back from the window and scanned the room. A handful of students had remained in their seats, among them Lucian, Eldric, Lara, and Thalia, along with a few others whose names Alex had not yet learned.
"Tch. Acting like countryside bumpkins." Eldric stood from his desk, swept a contemptuous look over the room, then walked toward the door. Before stepping out, he turned on his heels, raised his hand, and drew his thumb slowly across his neck in a throat-cutting gesture aimed directly at Alex before disappearing into the hallway.
Alex clenched his fist. Eldric was clearly telling Alex that he would not let go of Alex easily, and more than anything Alex wanted to make Eldric understand that trying to bully a Drakethorne would not end the way he imagined. But Alex was not like his predecessors. Alex could not defend himself the way they could, not yet, and that fact sat in him like a stone.
Alex started walking toward the door. The window had emptied out as students filed into the hallway, some of them still wearing that wide-eyed, disbelieving expression that Alex himself had been wearing not long ago. As he was walking down the aisle toward the front of the class, without any warning, he was thrown hard into the side of a desk by Lucian, who had been walking behind Alex.
Alex reflexively grabbed the edge of the desk with both hands and caught himself just in time, his nose stopping a breath away from the wood.
"Don't block my way," Lucian said, and kept walking.
Alex straightened and looked at the retreating figure ahead of him. "Why do you have a problem with me?" he called after him. "What have I even done to you?"
Lucian stopped.
But he did not turn around.
"I hate how weak you are," he said, and then continued walking.
Weak. The word echoed in Alex's head, pressing against the inside of his skull. "I will show you one day exactly how powerful I am," Alex said loudly, his voice carrying through the classroom and drawing the attention of the students who were still leaving the class, a few of them who were near the exit of the class also paused to look back.
Even this time, Lucian did not stop. Nor did he look back. He did not even slow down in the least. He was completely, effortlessly unbothered. Alex stood there with his jaw tight and his fists clenched at his sides, and from the corners of his vision he could see the small, poorly hidden smiles on the faces of the students who had turned to look at the show, their lips curving upward even as they tried to suppress it.
***
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